MoH receives document on doctors’ conditions of service
The Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, says the right of health workers to embark on industrial action in future will be factored into their conditions of service being worked out by the government.
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That, he said, had become necessary because any industrial action by health workers could be fatal to the public and the consequences could not be reversed.
“Your right to strike will be negotiated at the table since your actions are fatal and the consequences cannot be repaired”, he said.
The minister made this known when the final document of a technical working group on the framework for negotiations of conditions of service for the public sector health workforce was presented to the Minister of Health, Mr Alex Segbefia, in Accra yesterday.
Mr Iddrisu said “the government recognises the effects of these strikes and so there was the need to deal with issues head on”.
The Ghana Medical Association (GMA) last Sunday threatened to embark on an industrial action if its members did not have a negotiated and signed conditions of service by the end of this month.
At the end of its third national executive council (NEC) meeting in Cape Coast last Sunday, the GMA said it would hold the government to its promise to ensure that GMA members working with the Ministry of Health through the Ghana Health Service and the teaching hospitals were provided with conditions of service.
The minister said the right to strike was limited to health workers due to the role they played in society and indicated that the government intended to fast-track the negotiations of the conditions of service for the health professionals.
He gave the assurance that latest by next week Wednesday, June 10, 2015, the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission, as well as the Compensations Department of the Ministry of Finance, would look into the document presented.
He said the intentions of government to fast-track the document should not be misconstrued but that “the government was doing the right and deserving thing”.
Presentation of document
After receiving the document, the Minister of Health said the presentation of the document was historic as it had been on the drawing board for the past 10 years.
He said the ministry together with the Attorney General’s Department and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission would look into it and make the necessary inputs before it would be signed by all stakeholders.
He said what was needed now was for the Ministry of Finance to have the document in its final stage to enable it to make provisions in the 2016 budget so that the public sector health workers would be paid accordingly.
The President of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA), Dr Kwabena Opoku-Adusei, who presented the document to the Minister of Health and a copy to the Minister of Labour, said it had been “a tortuous 10 years”.
He said the framework when adopted would help other unions within the health service to negotiate for their conditions of service.
He said it was the hope of the GMA and the various unions within the health sector that they would be able to negotiate for their conditions of service before the end of June to help bring sanity into the system.